Skip to main content
Fennie
HomeGet Started
UW–Madison
Economics
4 credits

UW–Madison ECON 101: Principles of Microeconomics

ECON 101 is UW–Madison's introductory microeconomics — supply and demand, elasticity, consumer and producer behavior, and market structures — one of the largest courses on campus, serving pre-business students, economics majors, and a broad gen-ed population.

Fennie is independent and not affiliated with University of Wisconsin–Madison. This is an unofficial study guide.

Build my ECON 101 study plan

What makes it hard

The grade rides on exams that test application: shift the right curve, compute the elasticity, compare market structures under time pressure. Lecture intuition feels sufficient until exam questions built so two answers look right expose the gap between familiarity and fluency — and the pre-business crowd makes the curve real.

What you'll cover

  • • Supply, demand, and equilibrium
  • • Elasticity
  • • Consumer and producer surplus
  • • Costs of production
  • • Perfect competition and monopoly
  • • Market failures and policy

The ECON 101 study guide

How to study for UW–Madison ECON 101, step by step.

  1. 1

    Make practice questions the study unit

    ECON 101 exams test doing — shifts, computations, comparisons — so study time belongs in problems from week one. Rereading notes builds familiarity, the exact false signal this course punishes.

  2. 2

    Draw graphs by hand until automatic

    Supply-demand shifts, surplus regions, cost curves, market structures. Producing the graph and its reasoning from scratch is what the questions secretly test, even in multiple-choice form.

  3. 3

    Drill elasticity for both speed and meaning

    The calculations are simple but exams reward pace, and interpretation questions follow close behind. Practice until number and meaning arrive together without hesitation.

  4. 4

    Build a one-page market-structures comparison

    Competition versus monopoly: assumptions, demand curves, outcomes, efficiency, side by side. Comparison questions are a fixture and crammed models blur together.

  5. 5

    Let Fennie run the practice calendar

    Upload your ECON 101 syllabus and Fennie's Daily Plan paces graph and problem practice ahead of each exam, with practice questions generated from your actual course material in the format you'll face. Free to start.

    Start my ECON 101 plan free

How Fennie helps with ECON 101

Fennie's Daily Plans pace ECON 101 with application practice scheduled ahead of each exam — the curve-shift and computation reps the tests actually measure. Chat through scenarios until the graph reasoning is automatic, then drill generated questions in exam format to confirm it under time.

FAQ

Is ECON 101 at UW–Madison hard?

Moderate: the concepts are intro-level, but exams reward applied precision and speed, and the pre-business population keeps the bar honest. Students who practice application questions outperform note-rereaders almost mechanically.

How do I study for ECON 101 exams?

Work practice questions in exam format — curve shifts, elasticity computations, market-structure comparisons — under time. Draw the graphs by hand until automatic; the reasoning behind the graph is what questions test.

Should I take ECON 101 or ECON 102 first?

They're independent and either order works. Many students find micro (101) the more concrete entry point, and pre-business plans typically require both — schedule by convenience.

Pass ECON 101 with a plan, not a cram

Upload your ECON 101 materials and Fennie generates a Daily Plan paced to your deadline — plus chat, flashcards, and quizzes built from the actual course content.

Get started free

More UW–Madison courses

CS 200 — Programming I

CS 200 (officially COMP SCI 200) is UW–Madison's first programming course, taught in Java — variables, control flow, methods, arrays, and an introduction to objects — serving intended CS majors, data science students, and a large population just adding programming skills. It assumes no prior experience.

CS 300 — Programming II

CS 300 (officially COMP SCI 300) is UW–Madison's object-oriented programming course in Java — classes, inheritance, interfaces, exceptions, recursion, and intro data structures like array lists and linked lists — and one of the largest courses on campus, since it gates the CS major and serves data science, engineering, and statistics students besides.

CS 400 — Programming III

CS 400 (officially COMP SCI 400) completes UW–Madison's programming sequence: data structures and their implementations — balanced search trees, hash tables, graphs — plus software development practices like version control, testing, and team projects, all in Java.

CS 240 — Introduction to Discrete Mathematics

CS 240 (officially COMP SCI 240) is UW–Madison's discrete math course for the CS major — logic, proofs, induction, sets, functions, counting, recurrences, and graphs — the mathematical foundation that CS 577 and the theory electives build on.